Favourite Blogs - Spitalfields Life

Dennis Server's House at 18 Folgate St

Spitalfields Life is a captivating blog by an unnamed 'gentle author' who introduces himself evocatively thus:

'In the midst of life I woke and found myself living in an old house beside Brick Lane in the East End of London.

Over the coming days, weeks, months and years, I am going to write every single day and tell you about my life here in Spitalfields at the heart of London. How can I ever describe the exuberant richness and multiplicity of culture in this place to you? This is both my task and my delight.

Let me disclose to you the hare-brained ambition I am pursuing, which is to write at least ten thousand posts about Spitalfields life. At the rate of one a day, this will take approximately twenty-seven years and four months. Who knows what kind of life we shall be living in 2037 when I write my ten thousandth post?

I do not think there will be any shortage of material, though it may be difficult to choose what to write of because the possibilities are infinite. Truly all of human life is here in Spitalfields.

It is my custom to walk everywhere in London and I discover things on my walks, so you will also find stories here from the many places that are within walking distance of Spitalfields.

The days go by quickly and I am always eager to discover more stories. It is through meeting more people and learning more about this place that my understanding will grow and this project will evolve. I am open to all approaches.

Every Sunday, I get up early and walk to Columbia Road Market, buy some plants and write a weekly report to create an account of the seasons at the flower market. Knowing that I must not disappoint you enables me to get out of bed and fills my garden with plants too.

Like Good Deeds and Everyman in the old play, let us travel together. I promise to keep writing to you every day and it will be an eventful journey we shall have together.'

The 'gentle author' - who I believe to be a man, although that simple fact is never made clear - has made good on his promise; a new post arrives each morning - beautifully drawn stories of people, shops, streets and buildings, filled with sympathetic insights into the lives of those he describes. I doubt whether any part of London has been so closely observed. For me, it's a mixture of Gilbert White and the prose of the unnamed writer who used many years ago to pen a weekly column for The Field. And although it began only in August 2009, it's already a masterpiece.

On Spitalfields, this piece by Raphael Samuel in July 1988, will explain its significance and history

Spitalfields is the oldest industrial suburb in London. It was already densely peopled and “almost entirely built over,” in 1701 when Lambeth was still a marsh, Fulham a market garden and Tottenham Court Rd a green. It owes its origins to those refugee traditions which, in defiance of the Elizabethan building regulations, and to escape the restrictions of the City Guilds, settled in Bishopsgate Without and the Liberty of Norton Folgate.

Spitalfields is a junction between, on the one hand, a settled, indigenous population, and on the other, wave upon wave of newcomer. Even when it was known as ‘The Weavers’ Parish,’ it was still hospitable to many others – poor artisans, street sellers, labourers among them. In the late nineteenth century Spitalfields was one of the great receiving points for Jewish immigration and the northern end of the parish provided a smilar point of entry for country labourers. There was a whole colony of them at Great Eastern Buildings in the eighteen eighties, working as draymen at the brewery, and another at the Bishopsgate Goods Station. This ‘mixed’ character of the neighbourhood is very much in evidence today.

Spitalfields Market – threatened with imminent destruction by a coalition of property developers, City Fathers, and conservationists – is almost as old as Spitalfields. It was already in existence when the area was still an artillery range. In John Stow’s ‘Survey of London’ (1601) it appears a trading point “for fruit, fowl and root.” A market sign was incorporated in the coat of arms for the Liberty of Norton Folgate in Restoration times, and the market’s Royal Charter dates from 1682. The market, in short, preceded the arrival of the Hugeunots and has some claim to being Spitalfields’ original core. The market continued as a collection of ramshackle sheds and stalls until it was transformed, in the 1870s, by Robert Horner, who bought the lease of the land from the Goldsmid family in 1875. Horner was a crow scarer from Essex who, according to market myth, walked to London, became a porter in the market and eventually got a share in a firm. Ambitiously, he set about both securing monopoly rights for the existing traders, and replacing the impromptu buildings with a purpose built market hall – the “Horner” buildings which today is the oldest part of the market complex.

The older, eastern portion of the market is the direct product of Robert Horner’s vision of his own situation. It is built in the manner of the English Arts & Crafts movement. On its own terms, the old market is a pleasing piece and a worthy addition to the diversity of Spitalfields. Its rusticated archways on the Commercial St facade and the repeated peaks of the roof with their smallish sash windows lend a clearly Victorian flavour to Commercial St, which was largely a Victorian venture anyway. Inside the market it is a vintagely Victorian hall of glass and iron of unassuming beauty, even more so when at work, then its true worth as a genuinely functioning piece of Victorian space is revealed. Like St. Pancras in a different way, it has an element of the museum and an aesthetic that overlays the original construction upon utilitarian principles. Most of all the old market appears as a peculiarly English space. An effect that is heightened by the lavish use of ‘Wimbledon’ green. It is that deep traditional green that characterises English municipal space and that, in this case helps to marry the market to the discordant additions of the late 1920’s and to give distinction to the territorial boundaries of the market that have been historically more fluid.

The old market is a celebration of trade, a great piece of Victorian working space, not only of great historical value itself, but contributing to the visual manifestation of the historical development of the whole of Spitalfields. It is a worthy layer in an area that grew by a sort of architectural sedimentation. Hawksmoor’s Christ Church, the Huguenot fronts of Artillery Passage, the Georgian elegance of Elder St and the smaller houses of Wilkes St and Princelet St, the mid-Victorian utility of the Peabody Buildings, the rustic character of the old market, the twentieth century neo-classicism of the Fruit Exchange and several examples of a more unspeakable modernity are some among many accretions which contribute to make Spitalfields what it is. The most perfect example of a palimpsest in which diversity rather than Georgiana or Victoriana represent the true nature of the area.

The character of a district is determined not by its buildings, but by the ensemble of different uses to which they are put, and, above all, by the character of the users. It should be obvious to all but the self-deceived, that to stick an international banking centre in the heart of an old artisan and market quarter, a huge complex with some six thousand executives and subalterns, is, to put it gently, a rupture from tradition. The whole industrial economy of Spitalfields rests on cheap work rooms: rentals in the new office complex are some eight times greater than they are in the purlieus of Brick Lane, and with the dizzy rise in property values which will follow the new development, accommodation of all kinds, whether for working space or home, will be beyond local people.  The market scheme will mean a social revolution, the inversion of what Spitalfields has stood for during four centuries of metropolitan development.

The fate of Spitalfields market illustrates in stark form some of the paradoxes of contemporary metropolitan development: on the one hand, the preservation of ‘historic’ houses; on the other, the wholesale destruction of London’s hereditary occupations and trades and the dispersal of its settled communities. The viewer is thus confronted with two versions of ‘enterprise’ culture: the one that of family business and small scale firms, the other that of international high finance with computer screens linking the City of London to the money markets of the world.

Raphael Samuel  22nd July 1988 

Favourite Places

The Test at Fulling Mill, Whitchurch. This stretch of the river and the Mill was once owned by my step-grandfather. Click here for his granddaughter's reminiscences

Favourite Places

Dartmoor

Farewell Lexus

The Lexus at the top of Beech Hill, with Stocks behind

My brave Lexus Coupe has been declared a CTL and is no more (except that the number plate - H2PNO - has been transferred to Kei's Prius). Having been virtually trouble-free all its life, it was found to need a number of repairs that would have cost far more than its value.

It's been a marvellous car (as you can read here from an earlier post) but it will no longer sit outside waiting to take me on long drives into the countryside where the whistle and crack of the turbos were all one needed in place of music. Farewell and thank you.

Favourite Cartoons

As you already know, one of my favourite cartoonists is Pont, whose inspired drawings of 'The British Character' remain as accurate today as in the 1930s.

Favourite Poetry - Constantine Cavafy

Morning Sea

Let me stop here. Let me, too, look at nature awhile.
The brilliant blue of the morning sea, of the cloudless sky,
the shore yellow; all lovely,
all bathed in light

Let me stand here. And let me pretend I see all this
(I actually did see it for a minute when I first stopped)
and not my usual day-dreams here too,
my memories, those sensual images.

Constantine P. Cavafy

Favorite Poems: A 9th Century Chinese Poem on Old Age

'We are growing old together, you and I;
Let us ask ourselves, what is age like?
The idle head, still uncombed at noon.
Propped on a staff, sometimes a walk abroad;
Or all day sitting with closed doors.

One dares not look in the mirror's polished face;
One cannot read small-letter books.
Deeper and deeper one's love of old friends;
Fewer and fewer one's dealings with young men.
One thing only, the pleasure of idle talk
Is great as ever, when you and I meet.'


A 9th Century Chinese poem on old age, 
sent to Isaiah Berlin by Stephen Spender

Isaiah Berlin

I was lent a superb book by Ham and Cecilia Lloyd for my trip to Japan, Michael Ignatieff's Life of Isaiah Berlin. It's a masterpiece, illuminating his philosophical writings so elegantly and self-effacingly that one is left with a clear perspective on a fascinating life and mind.

Here are a few excerpts:

1. All his life, he attributed to Englishness all the propositional content of his liberalism: 'that decent respect for others and the tolerance of dissent is better than pride and a sense of national mission; that liberty may be incompatible with, and better than, too much efficiency; that pluralism and untidiness are, to those who value freedom, better than the the rigorous imposition of all-embracing systems, no matter how disinterested, better than the rule of majorities against which there is no appeal.' All this he insisted, was deeply and uniquely English.

2. Jewish energy is described as pushiness; cleverness becomes arrogance; exuberance turns into vulgarity; affection is seen as sentimentality. He never entirely ceased seeing his own people through the eyes of their detractors.

As he wrote to Felix Frankfurter, 'the trouble about the Israelis is not only their partly unconscious conviction born of experience that virtue always loses and that only toughness pays, but a great deal of provincialism and blindness to outside opinion'.

3. Nor were his spirits lifted by his exposure to the 'great big glaring sunlit extrovert over-articulated scene' of America. In a letter to his father, he admitted that Americans were 'open, vigorous, 2x2=4 sort of people, who want yes or no for an answer' but he longed for the company of people with a European 'nuance'. To his Oxford friend Mary Fisher he confessed that he was miserably homesick for the complex and mysterious social mazes of Oxbridge: there were no mazes in America, nothing but flat, clear vistas. Conversation with Americans were equally disappointing: 'a total lack of salt, pepper, mustard'. Though his view of Americans softened as he grew to know them well.

4. In the four Bryn Mawr lectures, he set out the distinction he was later to make famous between negative and positive liberty. Only at this stage he called them 'liberal' and 'romantic'. Until Rousseau, liberty had always been understood negatively, as the absences of obstacles to courses of thought and action. With Rousseau, and then with the Romantics, came the idea of liberty being achieved only when men are able to realise their innermost natures. Liberty became synonymous with self-creation and self-expression. A person who enjoyed negative liberty - freedom of action or thought - might none the less lack positive liberty, the capacity to develop his or her innermost nature to the full.

Berlin evidently approved of the ideals of self-realisation. The danger lay in the idea, latent in Enlightenment rationalism and Romanticism alike, that men might be so blinded by their true natures - by ignorance, custom or injustice - that could only be freed by those revolutionaries of social engineers who understood their objective needs better than they did themselves.

' This is one of the most powerful and dangerous arguments in the entire history of human thought. Let us trace its steps again. Objective good can be discovered only by the use of reason; to impose it on others is only to activate the dormant reason within them; to liberate people is to do just that for them which, were they rational, they would do for themselves, no matter what they in fact say they want; therefore some forms of the most violent coercion are tantamount to the most absolute freedom.'

To free a man, Isaiah insisted, was to free him from obstacles - prejudice, tyranny, discrimination - to the exercise of his own free choice. It did not mean telling him how to use his freedom.

5. It had been a mistake for the philosophers of the Enlightenment to suppose that men and women could live their lives according to abstract principles, cosmopolitan values and what he called 'idealistic but hollow doctrinaire internationalism'.

'This rejection of natural ties seem to me noble but misguided. When men complain of loneliness, what they mean is that nobody understands what they are saying: to be understood is to share a common past, common feelings and language, common assumptions, possibility of intimate communications - in short, to share common forms of life.'

6. Convention does not in itself imply slavery; it is largely that instinctive law that arises out of mens' fear of anarchy, which is as far removed from freedom as tyranny itself. In this function convention is often a safeguard of inner liberty, creating as it does a broad external disciplinary equality which leaves room for complete inner non-conformity. It hurts no man to conform if he knows that conformity is only a kind of manners, a sort of universal etiquette.

The Joys of the iPad

I don't know why I ever hesitated before getting an iPad; I suppose it was its superficial resemblance to my iPhone. But a friend showed me the iBook reader on hers at - appropriately enough - the Antiquarian Book Fair, surrounded by illuminated manuscripts - and I could immediately see that it was a completely different experience from even a very clever and versatile mobile phone.

I love reading books and magazines on it (my son suggested Popular Science, which is brilliant); and I read The Big Short by Michael Lewis on the plane to Japan and it was a joy. What's more the battery barely blinked. My only disappointment at the moment is the selection of books in the iBooks store. Mostly new stuff. And even then I tried to find the Life of Isaiah Berlin by Michael Ignatieff, but it's nowhere to be seen. I had better luck with the Kindle for iPad as it grabs stuff from Amazon. And there are a number of amazing free apps that give you access to hundreds of old classic books, so there are compensations - and anyway the publishing world will soon catch up.

Actually, the thing that I didn't anticipate is the sense of ease and freedom that come from not having to muck around with a mouse and keyboard. The keyboard on the iPad is pretty good, and as I'm such a poor typist the auto-correct function actually makes it faster for me to type on it than on a laptop. And no mouse - well it's like using keyboard shortcuts, only with added functions that are completely intuitive.

The Advantages of the iPad

1. You can read it on summer evenings without turning on the lights
2. The absence of a mouse and the ability to touch and manipulate the screen gives the iPad greater freedom and flexibility than a laptop. It's also easy to type fast as the auto-correct is so efficient.
3. The Apple case makes it much easier to use; held like a book, or propped up for easier typing.
4. You can chuck it onto the sofa when you have finished using it for someone else to pick up. It's far easier than lugging your laptop around.
5. You can stay with people: you don't have to go to your desk except for heavy-duty stuff like uploading photos or writing long screeds.
6. Its huge battery life means that you don't have to charge it up all the time.
7. Not only is it fantastic for book and newspapers, but with TV Catchup, you can watch live TV anywhere - even out in the garden in the evening.
8. No one know what you're reading or watching. If you want to watch Zombies v. Cannibals Part III you can. Everything can be done privately - as with a mobile phone.
9. It's perfect for looking at photos from Flickr and the other photo sites, though the absence of Flash means that you can't view a slideshow
10. It would be great for marketing visits - showing people catalogues, videos, photos and other stuff.
11. The 3G version would be best for 'out and about' work as wi-fi can't then be guaranteed, but it's a one-off cost and not that expensive.

Using the iPad in Marketing (Japan)
The Japan Times reports that the iPad has taken off far faster than the iPhone did (which is logical anyway) but that it's being snapped up by businesses who give it to favoured customers loaded with their website, catalogues, links and videos (I guess they would set up an app linking everything they wanted the customer to see of theirs - or send him an e-mail with the necessary links in - as of course the customer would have to set the thing up on his own via iTunes - or maybe they go round and help with the set up and just put in the appropriate links). Salespeople carry one around with catalogues, videos and links in to use in sales.

Shops are buying them to leave around (there's no risk of theft in Japan) so that people can find out more about their wares through eg a video or a FAQ - and of course just to look cool. Hotels and businesses are leaving them in reception for the same purpose - letting people pick up their web-based e-mail - and read their newsletter, or browse newspapers and magazines (having paid for access where necessary of course). No need to order lots of hard copies each day. Lawyers can pre-load all the relevant papers for use when clients come in for meetings (I would use something like iDisc or Box.net for this). Likewise execs are using them in meetings loaded with agendas and minutes and all sorts of company info. They are of course far easier to use and less obtrusive than laptops.

Norman Buckingham 1918 - 2010

Capt George Brodrick taking a high pheasant with his keeper Norman Buckingham in a superb photo (Country Life)

Norman Buckingham, one of the country's greatest gamekeepers, died in Hampshire on 30th May 2010 aged 92.

He was for many years keeper to Capt George Brodrick of Eastwell in Kent. Capt Brodrick moved to the Dunley estate in Hampshire 1979, and Norman moved there with him, managing the shooting (which had been established by my step-grandfather, Sir Alfred Herbert) and helping to look after Mrs Brodrick after Capt Brodrick died.
















Norman Buckingham at home at Dunley in 2009

He was a legendary keeper and a great character with a fund of amazing stories. And he himself was a great shot. In the 1930's, he once shot 26 snipe with 26 cartridges and his father, who was also a gamekeeper, told him that nobody would ever perform that remarkable feat of marksmanship again.

Norman's obituary, written mainly by his widow Rita, gives a good picture of his very full life:
Norman died in Basingstoke and North Hants Hospital on 30th May 2010. He was born in Winterbourne Monkton, a small village near Swindon. The youngest of seven, he enjoyed a country childhood with complete freedom to roam and explore the glorious Wiltshire downland, which sadly few children have today. His father was a head gamekeeper, so he was well versed in gamekeeping, shooting, training gun dogs etc. However the pay did not satisfy the young Norman and in 1939 he applied to join the police force. As he was also in the territorials he was immediately called up when World War II started. The young gentleman farmer who was employing him at the time was eager to join up himself, so he pulled a few strings and got Norman out of the army, much to his disgust, to run the farm. That was not to be the end of his involvement in military matters.

Although officially a member of his local home guard unit, he was trained in the art of guerilla war for Churchill's secret army. These were fit young men in reserved occupations, and in the event of an invasion, would have been faced with fighting to the death (it was estimated that their life expectancy would have been about two weeks). Many years later a personal letter from George VI was found by his wife and framed before it was lost forever.

After the war, Norman decided to be a herdsman specialising in Guernsey cattle. He moved to Ham, Berks, where he met Ellie who was to become his first wife. They later moved to Twyford where their son David was born. Norman spent many years working and exhibiting Guernseys for wealthy landowners. He used to rrelate with relish the hialrious exploits he and his fellow herdsmen got on to at the shows!

He started at Eastwell Park, Kent, in 1958 for Capt George Brodrick. They were to form a friendship lasting the rest of their lives. Eastwell was a large estate of 7000 acres and in 1979 Capt Brodrick retired and asked Norman and his wife to move to Dunley Manor, where they both enjoyed shooting and fishing to the full. Norman also looked after the grounds and was a general factotum.

Sadly Ellie died in 1983 and Norman spent five years on his own. His little fox terrier Julie was a great comfort to him at this time. Rita and Reg Constable had been great friends with Ellie and Norman for many years in Kent. Reg died in 1984. The friends had always kept in touch and after some years Norman and Rita decided to enter into a relationship and later married. They were to spend twenty happy years together and went on many memorable holidays, including two cruises, which Norman enjoyed immensely.

Although he had several serious health problems in his mid 80s, he was as tough as old boots and led a fully active life until the last few months.

He has left a huge gap in the lives of all who knew him with his inexhaustible store of jokes and songs. He was a man who many people were drawn to and loved and will be sadly missed but never forgotten.

From Hill & Valley, the parish magazine for Hurstbourne Priors, Longparish and St Mary Bourne and Woodcott. July 2010